The Register

Plans to drop it like it's hot in 2019... Seagate has been testing a 16TB HAMR hot bit writing disk drive, with 20TB models in its sights.…

Plus: Boffins find kit struggles in low light, crowds The UK's data protection watchdog is investigating cops' use of facial recognition technology amid growing concerns about efficacy and ethics.…

As OECD strikes positive note on prospect of global consensus Hopes that European countries will imminently agree on measures for a digital services tax are foundering – but G20 nations have been told a global consensus is still possible by 2020.…

Data centre, edge computing: yep – business applications IBM has said it is possible to train deep learning models with 8-bit precision rather than 16-bit with no loss in model accuracy for image classification, speech recognition and language translation. The firm claimed today this work will help "hardware to rapidly train and deploy broad AI at the data center and the edge".…

D!ck the halls with 'offensive' symbols, fa-lala-lala-la-la-la-la You've heard of the e-penis – the measure of an individual's power and stance on the internet – but have you considered the street penis? Yes, 'tis the season to overcompensate by spewing the most garish Chrimbo lights display possible all over your home to let your neighbours know that you are indeed the big man.…

NCC Group discovers network-saving quirk during worm tests An infosec firm has unleashed a NotPetya-style worm onto a customer’s network – and discovered that a simple Windows Active Directory tweak has a surprising effect on self-spreading malware.…

If you think you have a full-fibre connection, you probably don't The UK's fibre industry wants European regulators, who meet in Brussels today, to get tougher on misleading broadband claims. Topping its complaints is "fake fibre" – the practice of calling broadband connections digital "fibre" when they contain plain old copper.…

Too late Xi cried, waving dead semiconductor deal in the air President Trump's White House has said China would be "open to approving the previously unapproved" deal for US chipmaker Qualcomm to acquire Dutch semiconductor maker NXP "should it again be presented" – but the firm reportedly said it "considers the matter closed".…

'Twas 3 nights after Xmas and all through the house, shareholders mulled sending the deal south Cloudera and Hortonworks shareholders will be asked to sign off on the companies' uneven merger on 28 December.…

You need spectrum – and find something better to spend £92m on, will ya? Interview Space policy expert Dr Bleddyn Bowen, of the University of Leicester, has told The Register that the UK faces considerably more hurdles replacing Galileo than just coughing £92m of "Brexit readiness" readies for a feasibility study on a homegrown version.…

Beancounter scores partial victory in employment case Offering disgruntled workers a fat cheque to quit is not blackmail, a court has told Capita.…

Escapes from wrath of the boss with ingenious fix Who, Me? Welcome once more to Who, Me?, the column for Reg readers to get their worst deeds off their chest.…

Oxford uni gets a wad of cash to study AI and law, Qualcomm invests in startups, etc Roundup Hello, welcome back to The Register's weekly AI roundup. There is news who is funding who for AI projects, but things have also got a little weird as popstars start making AI-inspired hits. Listen below!…

Plus, South Carolina convicts go catfishing Roundup November ended with a week of medical mishaps, near disaster at Dell, and the introduction of Pesky Pepper.…

Malicious code can spy on OpenSSL, Apple CoreTLS, etc Crypto boffins have found a way to exploit side-channel information to downgrade most of the current TLS implementations, thanks to ongoing support for outmoded RSA key exchanges.…

Boffins promise to return 'nauts to the lunar surface, too. No, really NASA adminstrator Jim Bridenstine on Friday announced the companies the US space agency plans to pay to send its next science experiments to the Moon.…

Yeah, we don’t know WTF is going on either Did your work printer produce a strange call to action this week, urging you to follow a tasteless twerp on YouTube, and then offer you a "bro fist" made up of punctuation marks?…

Japanese boffins argue for a new spin on astrophysics Black holes aren’t shaped like donuts after all, and actually look like water fountains instead, according to new research.…

Googlers sought patent on tech described during job chat Jie Qi, cofounder of edu-tech electronics biz Chibitronics, marked the launch of patent education site PatentPandas.org with her account of how Google tried to patent her research after inviting her to meet with company executives.…

Appeals judges shoot down Russian vendor's plea Kaspersky Lab won't be getting its day in court after all, as the Washington DC Court of Appeals rejected its case against Uncle Sam.…

Researchers find head-slapping backdoors in lab equipment Administrators overseeing lab environments would be well advised to double-check their network setups following the disclosure of serious flaws in a line of oscilloscopes.…

Strike fund hits $200K as engineers prepare for action Internal employee revolt at Google over its secretive plans to rollout a censored search engine in China continues to grow, with one employee publicly building a strike fund to support those opposed to the plan.…

Takes second place in IO-500 10 Node Challenge WekaIO has served up 95 per cent of the Summit supercomputer's 40 storage racks IO using just half a rack's worth of its Matrix scale-out fast filer software.…

BigInt and .NET Core 2.2 support? Oh Microsoft, you spoil us! On the eve of Microsoft's big developer shindig, or rather virtual developer shindig, Connect(); a fresh version of TypeScript has been released, along with an update for Visual Studio users who like their OS Apple-flavoured.…

And Sundar Pichai heads to griling on Chocolate Factory's data slurping Execs from Oracle, Microsoft and Google are reportedly to meet US president Donald Trump next week amid strained relations between tech giants and lawmakers.…

Plus standards news from ETSI, 3GPP Roundup Juniper Networks has announced it wants to bolster its Contrail enterprise multicloud solutions by chugging down software vendor HTBASE.…

If you shopped with 'em since March 2017, consider your deets in the haul Toff tat bazaar Sotheby's Home website has become the latest casualty of Magecart after a breach saw card-skimming code deployed by infosec rotters.…

Not just the gang at No 10 Downing St who'll be sweating Dell has reported results for Q3 of fiscal '19, ended 2 November, ahead of its December 11 shareholder vote on going public – now likely to be a shoo-in, if you go by what execs said on the call.…

EMIS upgrade will punt GP system into the fluffy stuff One of the NHS's major suppliers is upgrading its GP records system and moving millions of patient data to Amazon's cloud.…

Ashamed owner now trying to replace their soiled cases Residents of Auckland's North Shore in New Zealand who have found their pillows scattered with dog toffee can rest a little easier now – the master of the mystery pooper has owned up.…

Chat platform chap: 'Probably not us' Interview The controversial cloud filesharing functionality trumpeted by Microsoft for its chat platform, Skype, quietly moved from Insider-only to the big time this week, rolling out the day before OneDrive, er, rolled over.…

Subscribers using wireless calls wide open to attack Boffins from Michigan State University in the US and National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan have found that the Wi-Fi calling services offered by AT&T, T-Mobile US, and Verizon suffer from four security flaws that can be exploited to attack mobile phone users, leaking private information, harassing them, or interfering with service.…

'Minimal' effect on biz, boss bravely predicts HPE Discover The ongoing US-China trade squabble will have little effect on HPE, chief exec Antonio Neri boldly predicted to the world's tech press.…

Depressing Xmas Comms which employees have whole holiday to think about With Christmas around the corner, DXC Technology have warned yet more frontline techies - the feet on the street that support customers - they might not have a job in the New Year.…

One of, but not the worst, in history US hotel chain Marriott has admitted that a breach of its Starwood subsidiary's guest reservation network has exposed the entire database – all 500 million guest bookings over four years, making this one of the biggest hacks of an individual org ever.…

Where is your distributed ledger technology now? Though Blockchain has been touted as the answer to everything, a study of 43 solutions advanced in the international development sector has found exactly no evidence of success.…

Soon every vendor will want to be a SCMbag Exclusive The Register can reveal that Dell EMC is looking to add storage-class memory (SCM) and NVMe drives and fabric across its storage portfolio and that HPE's Nimble arrays will get SCM support in 2019.…

Bored secretary at GP fined for sneaky look at medical records A bored trainee secretary at a GP practice has been fined for snooping on the health records of colleagues, friends and strangers.…

Let the Blue Peter vs Magpie wars recommence! Something for the Weekend, Sir? Keep me in a cupboard. When the fancy takes you, let me out and I'll do your bidding. I won't mind as long as you make it worth my while.…

Does 'mommy' clean up after you? teases trash-talking notice Rubbish activists have reportedly put anti-littering signs up in the West Midlands calling trash bandits "fools" whose parents still tidy up after them.…

Nope, no new computer for you. Move along On Call Welcome once more to On Call, our weekly column where Reg readers share their tales of tech support problems solved.…

Once upon a time it was Windows 10. Now it's Chipzilla's turn HP Inc is flying high after netting a year of double-digit revenue gains, but execs are worried that a looming CPU shortage will hurt its sales in the coming months.…

American criminal prosecutors demand $815m from former CEO, throw book at the pair Updated Former Autonomy CEO Michael Lynch and company beancounter Stephen Chamberlain have been formally charged with fraud in America, in what Lynch's lawyer has called a “travesty of justice.”…

Plus: Pat Gelsinger reckons tech will do well in 2020, even if the US economy tanks VMware has attributed a good third financial quarter to continuing strong interest in hybrid cloud services, payoffs from its AWS partnership, and an economy that remains friendly to technology spending even when there are headwinds elsewhere.…

It's 2018 and UPnP is still opening up networks - this time to leaked SMB cyber-weapons Earlier this year, Akamai warned that vulnerabilities in Universal Plug'N'Play (UPnP) had been exploited by scumbags to hijack 65,000 home routers. In follow-up research released this week, it revealed little has changed.…

Class-action lawsuit payouts adds another $7.3m to bill for software slip-up Lenovo will pay $7.3m to settle a class-action lawsuit stemming from its bone-headed decision to cram some of its laptops with Superfish adware.…

Well at least someone's interested in buying Hololens Microsoft has signed a $480m contract to supply 100,000 HoloLens augmented reality headsets to the US military – literally doubling the number of HoloLenses that have been sold since its launch more than three years ago.…

Sliding into your DMs unnoticed, literally Analysis Britain's surveillance nerve-center GCHQ is trying a different tack in its effort to introduce backdoors into encrypted apps: reasonableness.…

Endorsement could come back to bite Evander Holyfield The CEO of AriseBank, a Texas-based upstart that billed itself as the world’s “first decentralized banking platform,” has been arrested by the FBI and charged with securities and wire fraud.…

Buffer overflow flaw could lead to privilege escalation IBM is advising folks this week to check if they should update their Db2 database installations following the discovery of a potentially serious security vulnerability.…